The Long And The Short Of It

Well, so much for some closing night drama at these 2009 BMO Canadian figure skating championships in Saskatoon.
At least at the top of the final standings, that is.
While there is much still to be sorted out below him (see our previous post for more), Patrick Chan pretty much slammed the door on any possible doubt about who'll emerge as the newest king of Canadian men's skating. Turns out it's the same guy who won in Vancouver last year. Although there was nothing the same about the chap who showed up at the Credit Union Centre tonight.
From the moment who floated through the air and stuck the landing of his triple Axel, Chan was the man in this competition. He checked off the rest of his jump repertoire, wowed the crowd with some flashy spins and footwork, then grinned the biggest of grins as he soaked up the standing ovation that enveloped him even before he was done.
With an astonishing 88.89-point score — 7.5 better than his previous personal best — Chan pretty much made it game, set and match for this competition. He's a whopping 17 points ahead of his closest pursuer, Vaughn Chipeur of Edmonton. That isn't just a mountain of a deficit, it's a veritable Mount Everest.
"I was super excited to see that number," said Chan. "88 is just great."
Now here's the scary part. He says we haven't seen his best yet.
"I’m not going to complain," said the 18-year-old from Toronto. "Seriously, that is the best program I’ve ever done. But there’s little things you can work on, like footwork."
Still, he quickly grasped the magnitude of what he had wrought. And what it could help deliver for him at the world championships in March in Los Angeles.
"I just have to repeat the exact same thing," he said. "I’ll probably be a medal contender at worlds (with that performance), I would say."
Chan could only imagine what a similar effort would have done for him last month at the Grand Prix final in Korea, where he couldn't recover from a sub-par program and wound up fifth.
"I wish I knew," he said. "If I did know, I definitely wouldn’t be this hard on myself and I wouldn’t have this much pressure. Too bad we can’t predict the future because things would be much easier.
"But things would have been much different. I think I would have got a medal at the Grand Prix final if I did a short program like that."
The downer in Korea, he acknowledged, likely played in hand in what transpired tonight.
"You have to go on your ups and downs and (the Grand Prix final) was one of those downs," he said. "It was a really bad down. I came home after Korea and I was really upset, depressed. But I think it was good to have that now instead of closer to the (2010) Olympics.
"Hopefully, next year will be different and I won’t have to go through that again. Maybe a smaller down, not such a big down."
For now, though, everything is very much on the up and up.
Who knows where it will lead on Sunday night? It could be quite the finale to this Prairie ice show, indeed.